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MrSeb writes "In the Linux world, a war has been raging for a couple years. At stake are the hearts and minds of its user base. The combatants: the various distributions of Linux itself. For some time, Ubuntu Linux has been the clear leader in the fight, amassing more users than any other. Canonical and its baby seemed poised to take over the Linux desktop/laptop market completely — until it released Unity. Unity has caused an uproar in the Linux community — especially amongst the power users who decry its lack of customizability and inability to scale on big- and multi-monitor setups — and users are defecting in droves to Linux Mint, now the second most popular Debian-based distro and gaining fast on Ubuntu. Mint has very similar commands and shortcuts to Ubuntu, runs most apps the same as Ubuntu, and you can customize it to look and feel exactly how you want — which, for most users of Linux, is exactly what they want."

I've never been able to figure out why Ubuntu is so popular. It has always felt a bit annoying distro to use, especially with sudo and apt. On the other hand, after I tried Fedora I can't but love it. It goes really well along with CentOS too, if you run servers, and has a much larger company backing it (Red Hat). So why is Ubuntu more popular than Fedora? Is there some specific reason I don't see?

Frankly the debian package (.deb) format is about equivalent of RPM. They both declare dependencies. In fact I'm hard pressed to find any differences between them. Neither package system does automatic dependency resolution. That's what yum and apt are for. And yum and apt are much the same in that they resolve dependencies and automatically download packages. To say that debian package management is "way ahead of any rpm distro" is untrue. RPM as a package format works just fine. In fact it supported overlapping multiple architecture packages long before.deb files did. As for yum vs apt, that's a matter of taste. And actually apt appears to be losing favor to aptitude, which to me seems even more yum-like. Yum's insistence on always updating its catalogs is a bit annoying, but then so is having to run apt-get update every few days before running apt-get install. Sixes.

The real problem I have with debian is the way they organize the start scripts and things in/etc. I have always preferred RH's system-V-like way of doing things. We shall see what systemd brings us I suppose. Anyway, under the hood debian always lacked the refinement of the RH-based distros, at least in the aforementioned/etc/ stuff. And Ubuntu always seemed like it was just a pretty face on top of the roughness of debian. That is likely less true now than it was five years ago of course.

While there are slight differences, Debian has been using SysV as a default for a very long time. [Probably even since the beginning.] We also have file-rc and various other init systems available as options; while they may be the default at some point in the future, they're not the default now.

What you call lack of refinement debian people call flexibility. It is there because Debian is way bigger than RH, and the possible combinations of packages increasy, well, in combinatory way.

Also, that last fact is what people normaly mean when they say that apt is more developped than rpm, you can install more software, and seldon used packages normaly won't break your system, and will install. People are just bad at describing that feature. It does not mean that the software, or the protocol are better,

Frankly the debian package (.deb) format is about equivalent of RPM. They both declare dependencies

Just talking about dependency when we are speaking about packaging is talking about the tip of the iceberg only, and forgetting about the 90% under the water. Packaging involves a lot more skills. The real issue with RPM and yum isn't the result, which is now as much user friendly as in Debian in many aspects (I still prefer the Debian way, but as you said it's all about tastes). No, the real issue is how to actually make a package. RPM having all the packaging written on a single file, mixing both shell scripting, changelog, dependency, you name it... is simply a horrible idea. But that wasn't it, they had to make exception for patches that are lying around separately...

Yum's insistence on always updating its catalogs is a bit annoying

I'd write instead, yum insistence of not letting the user into the control of wants to do.

but then so is having to run apt-get update every few days before running apt-get install

You don't have to, you can use apt-cron or whatever so that your sources.list are always refreshed. In fact, what I find annoying is not being able to tell to apt "can you please just update THIS repo of my sources.list, I don't need to update the others".

And if you use aptitude instead of apt-* it does most of the jobs of apt-* and dpkg and a few other bits and bobs. It is essentially a wrapper around the same tools (dpkg, deselect,...) that apt-* use, but I find it a little more convenient.

Debian's package management system is just that, a system, not a single app. You've got a few different apps involved. dpkg handles the package installation/removal, apt-get (or aptitude, or synaptic, or whatever) handles repository stuff like dependency management (dpkg checks them, but can't resolve them), apt-file and other utilities provide other functionality.

Perhaps, but I (personally) had trouble using apt on the command line. What are the equivalents of rpm -qs package or rpm -qf file? The first lists the files in package package, and the seconds returns the package that contains file.

Fedore isn't very stable according to my own (very limited) experience.* Also, Ubuntu sports a mediaplayer by default and downloads the required codecs without hassle (doesn't bend over for patents, it just shows a warning screen once that what you do might not legal in all countries, and you might have to get a license for the relevant patents).

I am a Linux novice, and I recently installed Ubuntu and I found it refreshing that rather than give me a couple hours of headaches later, it gave me the option to download and install these items during the OS install. Previously you were constantly hitting these tripwires because it wouldn't install something that was "not free software".

Honestly, I will probably continue with Win7 for the bulk of my computing tasks because I don't want to invest a lot of time troubleshooting my home PC - "just works" appeals to me. Linux is fun to switch over to for a day or so but I always run into something that "just works" with my Win setup so.. back over I go.

I appreciate what people are doing with Ubuntu and Mint and I will keep checking. As soon as it's seamless for me, the novice, I'll switch. Until then...

That is the tradeoff, in a nutshell. For most people, who don't want to dick around with the internals of their PC to get it working, Windows 7, and even moreso Mac, is the right choice.

For people who instead enjoy optimizing their PC - setting it up "just right", and then having it work forever after that, Linux is the appeal.

And that is why Canonical shot itself in the foot with the latest changes - a less customizable experience can only possibly fly with an OS/distro that "just works" out of the box. There's just no one who both wants to labor to get their PC working, but then doesn't want to customize and tune it.

And that is why Canonical shot itself in the foot with the latest changes - a less customizable experience can only possibly fly with an OS/distro that "just works" out of the box. There's just no one who both wants to labor to get their PC working, but then doesn't want to customize and tune it.

Canonical blew their leg clean off, because not only did it become less customizable, it made my laptop less customizable, the one I had already worked to get "just right", in a way that was nigh irreversible. It's fine to make another product like Unity but goddamn, make it a different product, don't mark it as an upgrade to a very different system that plenty of people were happily using.

Ubuntu has tended to "just work" "out of the box" for the past several years, for me. As a matter of fact, when I became frustrated with Unity and began looking for another distro that suited my needs, I ended up reinstalling 10.04 (the Long Term Support release) because it didn't have Unity, but detected and interacted with my hardware setup with no issues, out of the box.

Other distributions' LiveCDs have failed to work on my system, or didn't feel right. I tried many of them over the course of about 10 days before giving up and going back to Ubuntu LTS.

Fedora 15 didn't like my dmraid, nor my audio card. It also felt weird, because it has Gnome3, which doesn't suit my workflow. Among other things, my brain visualizes multiple workspaces in a horizontal row, rather than a vertical column. I also don't particularly care for the new applications menu.

Plain Debian also had issues with my dmraid, and it just felt... well... clumsy and slow. Some of the slow was due to running from a LiveCD, I'm sure, but there's no way all of it was due solely to that.

Admittedly, Gnome3 is probably a lot of my issue with most of the current distros. I don't feel very friendly towards KDE, though, and XFCE isn't "shiny" enough for my tastes - it feels like stepping back in time about a decade.

Ubuntu 10.04 "feels" good - partially because I'm used to it. I'm used to the way the desktop environment is laid out. I'm used to having the system monitor in the center of my top panel, so I can see at a glance whether to expect my next operation to be a little laggy, or if I can expect the blazing speed I've become accustomed to receiving from my system. I'm used to the "eyecandy", with its wobbly windows and sliding desktop helping me not break my concentration when I'm in the middle of something. Having a window subtly react visually when I grab hold of it and drag it around; having the desktop visually slide across my screen when I switch workspaces; these things gives me the feeling I'm working with sheets of acetate on a horizontal line of projectors, rather than working with windows on a stack of workspaces. It's like the subtle background flow of information in a good novel or movie; it helps keep me from losing my suspension of disbelief, so I can perform the tasks I bought the computer for in the first place instead of wasting intellectual processing time fighting the system to get it to do what I want it to.

Ubuntu appears to "just work" with my hardware, and the current LTS version has a desktop layout I'm familiar with. Admittedly, I had to uninstall totem to get nautilus to allow vlc to be my default media player, but I haven't really had any major software snafus other than that and the buttons being moved to the "wrong" side of the application windows. Speaking of which, gconf-editor: apps/metacity/general/button_layout="menu:minimize,maximize,close" puts the buttons back where they're supposed to be.

I know I appear to be contradicting myself in the previous paragraph by showing how to "fix" things in the default Ubuntu LTS while saying that it "just works" with the default install, but moving the buttons doesn't "break" the system, whereas the changes inherent in Unity makes the system unusable to those who are only familiar with the previous versions. Ubuntu was stealing Windows users in droves when it looked and acted very similarly to Windows XP. This new change appears to be an attempt to snag the hordes of OSX users... which, in my opinion, is the wrong userbase in which to be looking for new converts. Canonical should have realized that their immense growth has been due to the fickleness of the users - continuing to build a solid base of users would have been smarter than alienating all the users they managed to steal from Windows when Microsoft decided to drastically change the UI.

To sum up, the majority of Ubuntu's users are stolen from the Windows camp, which is not surprising considering that they make up the overwhelming majority of desktop users. Many of them switche

Frankly, I continue to be disappointed with win7 laptop I bought a year ago. I hate not having an OEM DVD, and I still don't have all the crapware uninstalled. And 20GB for the OS? And the boot is slow.

So why is Ubuntu more popular than Fedora? Is there some specific reason I don't see?

For me it was RPM Hell. Before YUM, installing software using RPM's was a nightmare. You first had to download the RPM you wanted. Then you tried to install it, only to find that you needed more RPM's to fulfill dependencies. You would search and find those RPMs, only to find out they had their own dependencies, and the number of RPM's needed increased exponentially as each level grew. Well, this sucked!

Then I tried Debian. I typed in apt-get install app-name, and it found all the dependencies needed and installed them. There was nothing more for me to do. I vowed never to go through RPM Hell again! The problem with Debian, of course, was that it was always dated. Deb Stable was years behind everything else.

Then came Ubuntu. It was up to date and came with apt-get. That was it! I was done! I vowed never to go back to anything that used RPM's again, even after yum came out.

I tried Mint a few years ago. It was buggy as hell for me. Whenever the machine rebooted, about 2/3 of the time, I received a BusyBox prompt that really allowed me to do nothing. While onsite, I could simply reboot until it came back up. This was not an option when I was connecting remotely. Ubuntu never had this problem, which really confused me because Mint was based on Ubuntu.

Right now, I'm running the latest Ubuntu with either XFCE4 or Trinity KDE. Unity sux IMHO. It's not so much that I can't configure it as much as it that I can't figure HOW to configure it. With the old Gnome, I would click System and it would pull down a menu that either allowed me to edit personal or system configurations. I have no idea how to do that in Unity and I really don't care to learn. Hell, it's almost easier to type "gedit/ect/configfile".

Come over to sid. It's "unstable" in terms that it changes a lot. Sid is almost ALWAYS newer than Ubuntu. Because every 6 months Ubuntu draws a line in the sand and says "Nope, we're stopping here." Sure you get bug fixes and can go through and find a ppa that backports. As long as that ppa developer doesn't stop. Then you find another PPA. But it has a different naming convention and it's a (@#* nightmare.

Plus, Debian leaves my system the way I WANT IT. If I do an apt-get dist-upgrade I won't find XFCE replaced by Unity.-And to grandparent you don't get sudo and apt? It's nothing short of black magic. They debian developers have pretty strict guidelines. And now they even had a kfreebsd kernel that has zfs built in, all with apt-get. If I'm trying to compile something on my own and I get a "can't find libXXX.so.4" 99% of the time I don't even look for it before doing a "apt-get install libXXX4".

I went through years of RPM hell when friends tried to tell me "Oh you really should try out linux." Then I discovered debian on my own. (Mainly because it was started at Purdue). And... it was like the clouds cleared and it was amazing. Want something? Apt-get install. Don't want something? Apt-get remove/purge.

Yum is still pretty bad (disclaimer: I cannot get away from Fedora and I was once a Red Hat employee). Installing packages in a user's home directory is poorly supported (if you can even call it "support"), and removed packages that are not needed (e.g. libraries that are not dependencies of any other package and that do not need to be on the system) is still a giant pain. It is certainly better than plain RPM, and it beats the urpm system we saw in Mandrake/Mandriva, but there is a lot of work that will need to be done before we can be proud of it.

It's likely a massive case of NIH. Red Hat, despite being significant contributors, seem to be a bit dicey on this kind of thing. One of the reasons Ubuntu didn't adopt gnome-shell and created Unity, has a lot to do with GNOME, and thusly Red Hat's, reticence. The thing applies to systemd's being chained to GNOME, which stands a pretty good chance of relegating GNOME 3 to Red Hat and Red Hat-ish distributions.

It's a real pity, too, because Red Hat has and does a lot of good stuff (GNOME 3, some weirdness aside, works very, very well). Package management and UI refinement just happen to _not_ be things that they're good at.

Canonical, to it's credit, has pushed the UI and user experience issue very well for Linux as a whole and raised everyone else's game as a result. Unity might not be their finest hour, but they are trying to meet the needs of most computer users and grow Linux in a way that most other vendors had not in the past (remember when UI development was "how blingy a theme can we make?", or KDE's tendency to cram as many controls per square inch as possible?), and it is improving, version after version.

Mint does it's own thing very well, too. What it is, though, ultimately, is a riff on Ubuntu for conservative technical people who already use Linux and for whatever reason aren't a fan of Canonical's design direction. That's fair, and a good thing, but it's not forward-thinking, and it's not a lot different from any one of a number of other distributions. It fills a niche, sure, but it's not the new Ubuntu, nor should it be.

Google "Debian pinning", and install apt-listbugs. It will make you have a system based on stable with just the parts of testing or unstable you want. Then, cheer because you'll have the last update of every piece of software you care about much earlier than Ubunty or Mint.

It has always felt a bit annoying distro to use, especially with sudo and apt.

What's annoying about sudo and apt? You don't have to use sudo if you don't want to, adding a real root user is easy. But using sudo is good practice on any Linux system. And apt? Apt is one of the major reasons to use a debian based distro.

What's annoying about sudo and apt? You don't have to use sudo if you don't want to, adding a real root user is easy. But using sudo is good practice on any Linux system. And apt? Apt is one of the major reasons to use a debian based distro.

Having come from a BSD background as my first *nix-like OS exposure and later migrating to Gentoo for desktop use--and more recently to Arch, which I love--apt and friends seem spread out and feel somewhat inferior. They're not, of course, but given package managers I li

Ubuntu wasn't always annoying. I think until recently it was one of the most polished user friendly experiences there was. I think with their recent missteps that it is becoming annoying. Unity sucks and there is no indication in the latest release that the penny has dropped in Ubuntu land what they need to do to fix it.

A lot of people might contemplate going over to Fedora. It works pretty well with GNOME Shell. I doubt the different package manager means anything most of the time but yum has one pretty compelling feature - the presto plugin for yum which downloads and applies delta rpms. For the life of me I do not understand why deltas haven't been a standard feature of every dist for the last decade. Downloading a 30MB file just to apply a fix which probably only touched a few lines makes no damned sense.

Well, you sound like a troll, but have some interesting prospects in your post.

First of all, apt and apt-get were truly a first repository/packaging system which worked. It is strange that you couldn't find your way with it, especially with using Aptitude or Ubuntu Software Center (which is really still a bless, even I dislike Unity quite strongly).

1) It had a well maintained package system of configured packages. There was a time where most distributions configured the base stuff but other applications weren't fully configured.

2) At a time when all the competitors felt the need to be Gnome and KDE and traditional window managers, Ubuntu was able to be Gnome only and configure for Gnome giving a unified feel. The choice of Gnome was also good. Gnome had started to do very well around 2002 and KDE floundered, especially with respect to United Linux. Ubuntu along with distributions like Progeny and UserLinux came along at a time when the Unix community was ready to standardize on Gnome while early distributions had user bases that were much more divided.

3) Most distributions were trying to make money on their desktop versions and were discouraging free distribution. Ubuntu has never tried to make money off the distribution which led to two major advantages:a) Ubuntu would mail CDs with the distribution, which was useful for for install fests.b) But beyond that, you could access their repositories for nothing.

4) Ubuntu choose to build off Debian testing which is very high quality and reasonably up to date. Most other major repositories have failed in one or the other area.

5) Ubuntu focused immediately on hardware lists. Simple easy instruction to resolve problems on hardware, rather than opaque instructions. The Ubuntu forums were a huge step forward in Linux to the masses.

6) Ubuntu embraced the open source ideology with things like the circle of friends logo. Many of the early Linux companies were more focused on business acceptance at the time.

7) Many of the other distributions in the easy desktop space were going bankrupt. Ubuntu had deeper pockets.

______

So why is Ubuntu more popular than Fedora?

a) Easier to installb) Far fewer bugsc) General direction dictated by Debian and the distribution itself rather than by the needs of an Enterprise server distribution.d) A novice friendly community.

The Gnome polish that Ubuntu introduced went a long way as well, including things like a working network manager that dealt well with wireless connections, supporting administrative tools like gparted, Synaptic Package Manager, and other printer/user/gui management tools was also a boon. They made sure users never had to go to the command-line, and provided defaults that were acceptable to the majority of desktop users. Their focus on the end user desktop experience really paid off. I'm not sure if Mint can carry that legacy, for now I'm happy enough just apt-getting gnome and sticking with Ubuntu. The fact that GUI packages such as Gnome and KDE want to re-invent the wheel for every major revision is a bit troubling, and I'm happy that projects such as Trinity exist, even though they are fringe products. I'm actually intrigued by Gnome 3, but that doesn't change my disappointment over leaving users who have gotten used to and like Gnome 2 out in the cold. XFCE never seems to change, only polish, and that's great. Too simple/bare-bones for me though.

FreeBSD and the likes was included due to popularity (requests) rather then it being "linux" per se. For most users, having it within the rankings is much more valuable then the possibility of confusion.

Take a look at the pkgng project. It's currently in testing. Ports are great for source installs, but binary packages on FreeBSD can be a bit problematic. The pkgng project looks like it's doing a pretty good job of addressing this. There are also plans to do complete package builds on a weekly basis, which should fix some of the headaches with binary packages.

I moved over to FreeBSD.....It's a good operating system, but package management is a pain. If only if someone could port APT over to FreeBSD... sigh.

Totally.

apt-get install sumpackage is so much more comprehensible and understandable, and totally not a pain, whereas,

pkg_add sumpackage is out of control, a total pain, and whomever came up with such a nonsensical and grotesque idea is a really disturbed individual.

I keep telling people... read the book first. If you watch the movie first, you'll forever incorrectly believe the movie was better than the book. The movie is apt, but the book [netbsd.org] is the true source. And even the sequel [freebsd.org] is better than the movie.

I can't agree with this regarding FreeBSD package tools. I don't think it's the actual commands but rather the lack of features.

FreeBSD doesn't ship updated packages. Debian does. In the FreeBSD world, many people install third party tools to help them get updates (usually from ports) like portupgrade and portscout. I know they're working on this one, but it's not here yet.

apt-get and apt-cache offer ways to update the system from one command, search , etc. In FreeBSD, you have to use one command to add p

Yeah, I looked into it a couple of months ago. It looks like a good start, but there are a few problems, at least from my point of view:

1) They appear to have knocked out the FreeBSD userland and replaced it with a GNU one. Nothing wrong with that, of course; the problem is that my "stack" (random scripts, and actual project code) assumes a FreeBSD userland. This is probably my fault... I should look into making my code more portable.2) It's pretty sparsely developed. I don't expect corporation-backed support a la Redhat, but active forums and plenty of FAQs would be nice for any distribution I decide to use.3) Finally (and this is strictly personal preference) architecturally, I like where the FreeBSD userland is/is headed. Clang/LLVM, ZFS, jails... all good things. I'm not if/when these things (or their equivalents) will ever make it into Linux.

I can not recommend Ubuntu to new users at all at this point. For having things "just work", Mint is where it's at, these days. Canonical got too full of themselves, and dropped the ball. Unity isn't the only problem.

The big promise of Linux Mint lies in the upcoming release 12. They are trying fix what the Gnome developers fucked up so royally and no one else has been able to do: fix Gnome3. They have a set of extensions that, at least judging from a static desktop screenshot [linuxmint.com], look like they will actually make Gnome3 usable like Gnome2. The release candidate due tomorrow [linuxmint.com] should tell the story for these MSGE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions).

Having tried the RC for a few dozen minutes, I can tell that MSGE is quite good in making Gnome3 feel more "like home".
Having the bottom window task list bar and sane alt-tab experience doesn't magically fix what is broken in Gnome Shell (configurability is still missing), but it's a step in a good direction IMO -- it lets people used to "old" ways upgrade their systems with less fear.

Gnome shell does work great... if you install all the user extensions to actually make use bearable. With a few silly warts it's the best desktop experience I've had on linux in the last decade or so. Unfortunately out of the box it is a lot like opening a new toy on christmas and not having any batteries for it. It looks nice, and you can see the potential... but it's useless without the batteries.

You have actually *used* it on desktop for a week with open mind? I did exactly that, I'm sysadmin and I'm *more* productive with it - and I have three friends with are geeks and use GS on everyday basis without big modifications. Meta key with two or even one letter - and I have app running. In case when time is essential, it is a bless. All apps running fullscreen, without interaption from bottom panel. Switching finally sane with expose (can be improved though).

Look, problem is, people have problem with retraining stuff they do every day. With some geeks, it's colossal because they simply see themselves right. I'm not saying that GS doesn't have valid criticism - but it is very far from such claims as "it doesn't look like GNOME 2", "It looks too much Mac like", etc. Yes, it's different. If you don't like it, fine. Use other DE.

Why would you assume that? It took me about 5 minutes of, yes, actually trying it out seriously the day Fedora 15 came out to find out numerous reasons why Gnome3 was not going to be satisfactory for my needs:

1) NO GODDAM APPS MENU2) NO GODDAM TASKBAR3) Clock - cannot change position; cannot add day-of-week; cannot add seconds.4) No weather applet with current conditions, forecast, and radar map all right on the bar.5) No drawer applet for my own common app launchers, on the bar.6) No sensors applet for the bar.7) No CPU freq scaling monitor applet for the bar.8) No system monitor applet for the bar.9) No Mini Commander applet for the bar.10) Can't right click desktop to create launcher or start a terminal.11) Numerous other problems.

All of this stuff worked perfectly in Gnome2. So yes, if you don't ask it to do much of anything at all, and if you are satisfied with horrendously convoluted invocations for common tasks that used to be very straightforward, then yes, Gnome3 will satisfy you. Otherwise, not so much.

When most of that stuff gets fixed, I might switch to Gnome3. When ALL of it gets fixed, Gnome3 will be as good as Gnome2.

It doesn't matter what they "want." Either they will provide usable hooks and extensibility to configure it back to sane behavior, or they will write off all users who have even the slightest idea what they are doing. My sense is that the hooks are there, and we will continue to see better and better "extensions" that hide more and more of the CRAP default behavior of Gnome3. It's regrettable that it is such a long process, though.

I downloaded Mint 12 RC this morning and the new desktop is fantastic. The nice look of Gnome 3 with all the great features of Gnome2. Instead of telling users what to use, they listened and create a fantastic product.

The selection bias on Distrowatch is known to be skewed toward new users of a distribution. It's only on that basis that Mint has pulled ahead. There's a giant installed base of Ubuntu systems that don't appear in their data. Check out the zenwalk analysis [zenwalk.org] to read about the sort of trends that Distrowatch is actually useful for.

no you cant get rid of the non standard 2 pixel wide scroll bars that pop up to a scroll tab when you get over them. I hate them. I have spent hours trying to disabled the damn things and they stay there on the File manager and the settings apps.

From the time stamps it took six whole minutes to hunt down this trouble ticket on a random blog comment and resolve the customer's desire for some obscure user interface customization. You guys are slipping. Back in the day this would have only taken four minutes. No wonder people are switching back to Windows.

One reason: Mint's heavy handed tendency to replace the default Google search with a 'Mint-ized' version of Google search to draw revenue. I mean, I get it: it needs money. But if you're going to substitute something that works great (Google) with your own version of search to take eyeball money, give me something as good as or better than what I'm used to.
Granted, there are instructions out there to change this by running a couple of scripts and commands. But it would revert after updates were pushed down to the system. I had to do it at least once a month.
Disclaimer: I donated directly to Mint through PayPal, precisely because I changed the search engine knowing full well this is a way the get money. I would not mind paying a bit more and a bit regularly if they would keep their hands of my search.

The real winner of course is Debian. Being a devout debiate for many years (12), both the distros you speak of use debian as it's base. I use Mint myself for my desktops, it works well and their kde version was always better than kubuntu. I have even softened on my Gnome-hate somewhat with Mint's Main version and have even setup clients and friends with it.

While I'm sure ill get modded down, my personal opinion is that this is one of the problems that still holds Linux back from 'world domination' ( whatever that is ),

While admittedly its not nearly as bad as in 'the old days' when i jumped ship to the far more structured and focused BSD camp ( after being here from the very beginning ), the still rather fragmented Linux community wastes limited resources continuing reinventing the wheel, and 'doing things my way' which causes confusion for both end users and developers.

Sure 'choice is good' for the short term gratification me me me crowd, but if it hinders longer term goals it should be avoided if possible.

This is a major difference between BSD and Linux. BSD development/maintenance is very structured, whereas Linux is very organic. This allows each to achieve different goals---Linux undoubtedly has better support for newer hardware, whereas BSD is a very stable product.

I'm trying Linux Mint out in a VM right now, but I'm probably not going to switch from Ubuntu just because there's no real reason to.

LXDE, however, is awesome. It's the default window manager for mint, and on top of being very snappy and having relatively good configuration options, it supports dockapps! I don't have to use some end-around tongue swallowing app to get my precious square apps to work anymore! I don't have to run some hacked version of windowmaker to get a modern desktop anymore!

And the reason is pretty simple. They *really* focused on delivering a desktop thats rounded and end-user in idealism. Not really the usual focus on devs, or linux geeks, or coders or any of the normal compromises that are often tipped in other Distros. Things like a software manager, a user menu, and having DVD and codecs from the off. Wireless drivers that tend to work (as well as they do in the landscape of linux) - and lots of effort to focus on that idea.

The delivery of this across multiple versions has been praised, and is praise worthy, and its being rewarded by end users moving to it on one very simple thing. Merit.People like Mint. And the devs deserve that because of their desire to deliver something that is sometimes missed by Linux, and thats care for the end user. Somehow its a chunk of what Shuttleworth has totally lost in his headlong charge to unity. And its alos lost on the Gnome 3 devs who lost it totally as well. Now they went down a path that was more please themselves and ram it down people's throats. (Hi MS, I love how you've mimic'd the same stupid move with Metro).

Anyway, nuff said. I predict that in fact Mint 12 even with a bit of rough round the edges - will be welcomed by one and all, and others will in fact have to have a rethink. And thats a good thing.

You have to admire the Mint team.They're trying their hardest to reign in Ubuntu without abandoning the original desktop environment line.It's a nice sense of loyalty and dedication.

And it's a doomed effort, because eventually, Gnome will get the point where the combined effects of the "upgrades" actively work against the traditional (read: good, working, not-shit) desktop environment format, if not entirely stopping the possibility of Gnome being retrofitted to be like one.

"Awful" doesn't even begin to describe it. All development on it should be abandoned,
it should be ripped out of the distribution, the code should be printed out and burned, a massive
apology should be issued to the userbase, and any defenders left standing should be
forced to read 419 spam for a month...or until their minds crack.
This won't happen, of course. But 2011 will be remembered as the year that Ubuntu
began to fade into irrelevance, thanks to Unity and the fools behind it.

It is weird how people who want customization, seem to be singularly unable to install a different Desktop Environment that is customizable.
If you want a customized desktop, install XFCE, LXDE or KDE and STOP MOANING!

Let's look at a better popularity metric - what percent of which OS hit the servers of Wikipedia [wikimedia.org] in October 2011.

Ubuntu was 0.41% of all Wikipedia traffic with roughly 16.9 million hits in October. Mint was 0.01% of Wikipedia traffic, with roughly half a million hits in October. Ubuntu traffic dwarfs Mint traffic by many multiples.

In terms of the popularity of Linux distros hitting Wikipedia: Android was #1. Ubuntu was #2. Fedora was #3, just barely surpassing SuSE which is #4. Debian was #5. Mandriva was #6. Then comes along Mint at #7. In fact, Mint is barely even beating Kubuntu. Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it.

Things can change, and Mint may be gaining popularity, but we have to be realistic about things. I like a lot of things about Debian and Trisquel, but I'm also aware of the fact that for every Debian desktop hitting Wikipedia, there are 20 Ubuntu desktops hitting Wikipedia, including my own. That number goes to 1:30 for Mint to Ubuntu. So no, Mint will not be surpassing Ubuntu any time soon.

Unity has caused an uproar in the Linux community — especially amongst the power users who decry its lack of customizability and inability to scale on big- and multi-monitor setups

No, it's because it's slow, buggy, and makes it almost impossible to get to the programs and files you need to get work done by increasing the number of steps to do so. I don't know about multi-monitor support, but I'm guessing it's more to do with the UI's general functionality not support.

Yeah guess Linux will have to settle for 2/3rds of the server market, 95% super computing, the most popular mainframe framework outside of native, arguably the most popular cell phone environment. But hey, they didn't beat companies with hundreds of billions in market cap each at desktop.

I ran into these roadblocks before when I tried to switch. My laptop's wireless and sound didn't work along with a few other features and I got a lot of comments like "compile it yourself" or "use thiswrapper or thatwrapper" or "use wine". What if I don't feel like you should need development experience to get your PC running or keep it running...?

If you want regular people to adopt you should make it easy enough for regular people do adopt...

Changing the default GUI depends on your distribution packaging alternative GUIs without fucking it up. If your distribution can't package a default GUI without fucking it up, they're likely to not do the alteratives very well either.

The solution is to get a GUI agnostic distro. Debian proper has good packages for whatever GUI you care to run.

No, people are abandoning the distro because it's become painfully obvious that the people running it are batshit insane. It wasn't that they moved to unity, it's that they released an alpha quality Unity with a release. But, it's more than that, have they ever fixed the bug that made it impossible to log in via bluetooth keyboard? I temporarily dropped them because of that bug. OpenSUSE isn't afflicted by that particular problem.

Unity itself probably wasn't that much of a problem it was just obvious, up front and hard to ignore, I suspect that most of the folks that dropped it afterwards had been contemplating it up until that point.

(1) It's getting too buggy for my likes. I think this stems from (a) a focus on UI innovation rather than quality, and (b) they follow a bugs-be-damned 6-month release cycle.

(2) Lots of people, including me, hate Unity vis a vis Gnome 2. To be fair, many of us also hate Gnome 3 vis a vis Gnome 2, so Ubuntu didn't have many good options for people who like Gnome 2. But a lot of us think Ubuntu would be far stronger if they put their effort into making Gnome 3 be as good as Gnome 2 (like Mint did), rather than developing Unity.

Apparently Genesi paid Canonical to port Ubuntu to the Efika (ARM-based netbook). The result of this payment was a UI where large amounts of screen real estate are wasted, system dialogs (not obscure ones, things like the standard update dialog) that don't fit on the screen and require you to know about alt-drag to be able to click okay, and a standard system that uses 300MB of the machine's 512MB before you've even launched a single application. Oh, and a kernel that sucks at power saving. With a simila

--It wasn't that they moved to unity, it's that they released an alpha quality Unity with a release.

No, for most it pretty much IS simply that they went with Unity. If you are power user with big monitors (or multiples, or big multiples etc) where desktop space isn't at a premium, then why the hell would anyone want to hide buttons and options? Why make multi-tasking so hard? Why SEARCH for applications rather than hierarchical menus grouped logically by task?

My desktop isn't a damn phone thank you very much. I don't want it to be a phone and I don't want it function like a phone. And in the case of Windows 8 metro, it is just a blatent attempt to wrest control away from the OWNER of the device/computer. They envy the fact that apple users have given up every last semblance of control over look, feel and function of their electronic devices and that that control can be monetized. They can finally lock out apps they don't like and with UEFI they can finally lock you in to their OS so you can't weasel out of it after the fact.

No thank you. I will control my own devices, I'll be a power user with menus and widgets, multiple screens and multiple windows that AREN'T maximized.

You're assuming that the analysis (people are moving to Mint because of Unity) is accurate. I'm not sure it is. In my view Ubuntu's quality started going downhill two years ago when they released a security update which completely borked KDE. The Unity debacle is just another straw on the camel's back, but I wonder whether some of the people switching to Mint in the past year decided to move away from Ubuntu before the Unity affair kicked off.

Uh, no. The time consuming initial setup is one of the major reasons I don't use Windows. Let's assume both OSes take about the same amount of time to install from media. Once that's finished, applying all necessary Windows patches takes several rounds of download/reboot work. And I have to install each application individually.

Once I've got a new Linux system running, it's exactly one command and reboot to get all of the updated packages. And it's trivial to write a script that installs all of the packages you use, or just tick them off as checkboxes in a GUI package installer. Web browser, e-mail client, chat program, one program can install every single one of those. The same task on Windows takes hours of downloading individual programs, running their installers, and often rebooting yet again in the middle most of the time.

The only way Linux takes longer to setup is if your hardware isn't supported by your distribution, while being supported by your version of Windows.

Nothing about computing is intuitive, it's all learned. When people say "intuitive" they tend to mean "works like Windows." And Microsoft has enough of a hold on the desktop space to make Linux's entry virtually impossible, whereas fields that MS doesn't have any hold (mobile, supercomputing, embedded) it has a commanding presence (note that this is referring ONLY to the kernel, much of what we call "Linux" is not present in most Mobile or Embedded spaces.)

Your points are basically stating the obvious, but there is one I have to call out:

Extensive hardware and driver support. The current state is not good enough.

Fine, get the hardware vendors to start playing ball and we'll talk. So long as data sheets are held as trade secrets and drivers are kept proprietary there's little the Linux community can do.

just make it work like Windows!

See, called it before I read it. My response: go use Windows.

For all it's flaws, Windows is the standard in the industry. If Linux deviates too far away from this, it will forever remain a fringe option for technical or very determined users.

Or instead of letting Microsoft dictate how computing is done, do it differently and don't let the complaints of the technically ignorant hold you back.

If a normal user who is not doing anything unusual has to open the command line, this is a fail.

By that measure, XP fails. Sometimes the "safely remove hardware" icon disappears. The best fix I found was a command-line input that starts with rundll. I'm not a "normal user"; but I don't think wanting some reassurance that my USB drive is properly synced is "unusual".

I open the command line in Windows daily. The fact that youre not even sure if 'it still exists' kind of makes your whole rant uninformed and irrelevant.

This is further evidenced by your comment: 'Extensive hardware and driver support. The current state is not good enough.'.
If some hardware youre trying to use doesn't work in Linux it's because the manufacturers of said hardware have not supported it's operation in Linux.

I've found three challenges to using Debian instead of Ubuntu for new users. The first issue is that Debian releases aim for every two years. That means that users might have to wait much longer for a new release than the fast Ubuntu/Mint cycle, which impacts the ability of someone to get working drivers for newer hardware. Debian's support for recent hardware starts to look a little thin by the time it's, say, 1.5 years into its release cycle.

Debian's strict free software stance also means that many things don't work right unless you go out of your way to turn on the non-free repositories and add drivers. For example, I was frustrated that the Radeon card in my desktop crashed under Debian, and it's because the completely free driver that ships by default had a major bug in it.--which no one noticed because everyone uses the non-free one instead. There's a certain amount of ideological compromise needed to make Linux work on random hardware, from non-free driver code to binary blobs. Debian's strictness here works against mass adoption. The result is far less friendly than the restricted drivers GUI that Ubuntu provides.

The last issue is that the default Debian desktop has terrible fonts, so the first impression is often quite bad. This is a combination of the free issue above (which means no shipping of Microsoft fonts for example) with things like the libcairo problem [blogspot.com]. Font rendering is encumbered by all sorts of intellectual property issues, from copyright to patents on rendering. Ubuntu has been much more worried about getting them looking right in the default install despite those challenges than Debian, and it shows.